Associate Professor of English Michelle Mouton was the faculty speaker at the 2011 Commencement ceremony. She spoke to the more than 250 graduates and their families about the way their liberal arts education has left them better prepared than most for the challenges they will face.
Full text of Mouton’s speech
Thank you, President Brown, and Congratulations, Cornell Class of 2011. I am sincerely honored to be addressing you today, and I thank the senior class and President Brown for giving me this opportunity. As I look out at you, your families, and your supporters. I am struck by how truly I will miss you, both as a class, and as individuals. Four years ago, you entered the hilltop, having chosen to attend a small college in rural Iowa, whose name frequently gets confused with that of another institution, who has a peculiar investment in the color orange (as in carpeting) even though the official school color is purple, and whose academic calendar needs to be explained to others countless times. Now, four years later (or a little more or a little less), you’re prepared, eager, and, in some cases, more than a little nervous, to take on new challenges.
As you are all too well aware, the challenges facing your generation are great ones. An economic downturn has made entering the job market more difficult for you than for recent generations, and graduate and professional schools—more in demand than ever—have fiercely competitive admissions. Much around us is uncertain, and the rhetoric of crisis is pervasive: we hear this word used with respect to the economies of the United States and other nations; to conflict over economic-driven immigration all over the globe; to the results of a changing climate; to the status of democratic uprisings in eastern regions of the world, to the status of our health care; even to the rights of workers in the United States to bargain collectively; to the collapse of bee colonies, and to the lack of sustainable agricultural farming practices and safe food delivery systems. We perhaps don’t hear the language of “crisis” used enough over our involvement in several wars around the globe, but this, you know to be a challenge that you also face. And, you—and your classmates—will need to face these issues head on. Yet, even your own preparedness to do so, is determined to be “in crisis.” I hope to reassure you today, that despite the very real and daunting pathways that you will need to forge, you are indeed prepared, and as prepared as any generation has been, to take on such challenges.
I will try to keep my remarks brief and relevant, so that you will know that one who is “professorial”—a term that has very recently acquired negative connotations for reasons I can’t fathom—isn’t necessarily one who keeps people indoors far too long when summer has begun, and friends and family are waiting to share their congratulations in celebration.
The liberal arts have provided you, of course, with enriching discussions about how to live a meaningful life, how to understand the world around you, how to interrogate and evaluate arguments, how to tap into your own creative energies, and how to take ethical action. However, you might be unsure of the real value of your degree, if you have been listening to the media on the subject of Higher Education this year. In news stories with such titles as “Are American College Students Falling Behind” (Salon, Feb. 6, 2011), “A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students “Adrift” in College” (NPR, Feb. 9, 2011), and “Your so-called Education” (NYT Op-Ed, May 14, 2011); it has been reported that despite your spending on average four years in college (not to mention the fees you have paid and the loans you have incurred) there is a good chance that you have made little or even no gain in your critical thinking, your writing, and your complex reasoning skills—those skills most often described as highly desirable by employers, and as necessary for facing the particular challenges of our time. You have not slid backwards in these areas, but you may be leaving college right about where you began. These media claims come as a result of a study published in January, titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by sociologists Arum and Roksa, only one in a series of recent books questioning the value of today’s higher education. Let me give you some of the findings of this much-publicized study of more than 2,000 students from 24 undisclosed institutions:
These findings should, indeed, raise concern. But other findings of this study have been far less publicized. Significant gains in critical thinking, writing, and reasoning skills were made by students whose classes reflected high expectations, and the study defined high expectations as having at least one class per semester that assigned 40 pages of reading or more per week, and one class per semester that assigned at least 20 pages of writing.
If you thought that this celebratory lecture would be all bad news, you should see now where I am going. When I posted a New York Times Op-Ed on this study to Facebook, a Cornell English major alumni posted back, “Really? I don’t think I ever had fewer than 60-70 pages of reading every single day at Cornell for any class.” And I know that he, as an English major, certainly wrote more than 20 pages per semester. In other words, this report, for all of its frequently repeated alarming statistics, holds very good news for you, as Cornell graduates. Arum’s charge is largely levied against colleges and universities with low investment in undergraduate learning, and against colleges that provide incentives for faculty for everything except good teaching at the undergraduate level. You may have had a hunch that you were choosing the right kind of educational experience, and this data supports your choice.
But there’s more. The study also showed that those studying in traditional liberal arts fields—humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—made more significant gains in college than those studying in applied fields, like education, health sciences, and business. Kinesiology majors? Education majors? Computer Science majors? Are you listening? Are you bristling at this? Not to worry. The details of the study showed that these distinctions in gains between students who chose traditional liberal arts courses of study and those who chose applied courses of study were significantly reduced when the type of institution was taken into account. Cornell was not a participant in this student, but I cannot help but hear Cornell echoed in the implication that in selective institutions, where academic challenge and rigor was the norm, and a culture of student learning was pervasive, where students spend significant amounts of time on homework and academics—students, whatever the course of study, showed gains in critical thinking, writing and reasoning. Put this news on your resumes.
Arum’s study, then, is also good for the Humanities, which have been under attack in recent years, as evidenced by budget and curricular cuts based on the perception that they are expendable and do not sufficiently contribute to making us globally competitive. The classic question my students often get, “What will you do with an English major,” is not only a well-meaning voicing of concern for college students’ future economic security, but is also symptomatic of the broader rhetoric on education that emphasizes science and technology at the exclusion of the arts and humanities. In an eloquent recent plea against turning our backs on the arts and humanities, philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed to the connection between with the literacy and intelligence necessary for participation in a strong and vital democracy with the critical thinking skills associated with the Humanities, and the creativity and confidence nurtured in the arts. The humanities and arts add, among other things, a critical ethical dimension to decision-making, which is not taken into account in a politics that values only national economic growth and profit motive:
[E]ducators for economic growth will do more than ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality. It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them. (30)
It is the Arts and Humanities, Nussbaum argues, that teach not only critical thought, but sympathetic identification.
The need to defend the Liberal Arts, and particularly the Humanities, is not new. In 1720, Peter Burman, Professor of History and Eloquence delivered a highly satirical speech with the lengthy title, An Oratory Against the Study of Humanity: Shewing that the Learned Languages, History, Eloquence, and Critick are not only Useless but also Dangerous to the Study of Law, Physick, Philosophy, and above all Divinity. In this oration, published one year later in English, Burman satirically tells his listeners, a group of college students in the Netherlands, to avoid all hard work in the Humanities, and to get only a narrow vocational training, and then to revel in the outcome. He concludes:
Lest your parents and friends should find fault that you have done nothing at the university, and spent money idly that was allotted for your tutors and masters, desire them to try you at cards and dice, at the Coffee-house or the Tavern, and ranting up and down the streets, at dancing and walking priggishly, at adjusting your Dress and Periwigs, and I will answer for your being well qualified. (86-87)
Burman’s challenge wasn’t precisely our own. In defending the Humanities in the early 1700s in Europe, Burman was defending the benefits of studying Humanity—as he frames it—against a narrow study of the physical world, or against unquestioning rote learning of religious texts. Moreover, studying Humanity meant studying the Ancients, and not the modern world. My own field, English Literature, would not even be considered as worthy of study until nearly two centuries later. Perhaps needless to say, all of his undergraduates were men. The Liberal Arts and Humanities have changed since the 18th century. But Arum and Roksa, Nussbaum, and even Burman would agree that hard work and dedication to the Humanities and to the Liberal Arts yield importantly results, like critical thinking, and the ability to evaluate argument with complex reasoning—essential skills in navigating a complex world. And I am persuaded that the liberal arts are the best hope we have today. That you are prepared, and are the best hope we have today.
Whatever your course of study at Cornell, you have learned and grown in ways that Arum and Roksa’s study cannot measure. You have performed in senior recitals; you have read your poetry and fiction to new audiences; shared your original artwork with gallery visitors; presented your scholarship for critique at Student Symposium; learned discipline, and excelled at sports; traveled abroad and deepened your learning in foreign languages; completed internships; engaged in formal debate; designed and conducted studies and experiments; taught in your own classrooms as student teachers; heard and visited with world-class scholars, writers, and artists. You have come to know your own strengths.
I could go on, but have been “professorial” long enough. I just want to leave you with the reminder that while your degree may be complete, your education is not. I believe I speak for all of my colleagues when I say that the most important thing you have learned is how to learn, and we hope that you will embrace learning beyond Cornell. Read. Read widely. Read broadly. Weigh Evidence. Participate fully in the world around you. In other words, continue to be a liberal learner. Thank you.
Works Cited
Arum, Richard and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2011. Print.
–. “Your so-called Education.” Editorial. Newyorktimes.com. New York Times Co., 14 May 2011. Web. 16 May 2011.
Burman, Peter. An Oration by Mr. Peter Burman Against the Study of Humanity: Shewing that the Learned Languages, History, Eloquence, and Criticick are not only Useless but also Dangerous to the Studies of Law, Physick, Philosophy, and above all Divinity, to which last Poetry is a Special Help. London: J. W., 1721. Google Books.
“A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ in College.” NPR.org. NPR Social Media, 9 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 May 2011.
Nussbaum, Martha. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.
Melander-Dayton, Adele. “Are American College Students Falling Behind.” Salon.com. Salon Media Group, Feb. 6, 2011. Web. 16 May 2011.